In this paper, I argue that the pedagogical legacies of show travesti shape a coalitional, transnational feminist approach to gendered labor in popular music through transfeminine nightlife economies. My interlocutors describe show travesti as “women working as women” in distinction from crossdressing performances (e.g., drag), where showseras honor the legacies of women’s music-making in popular music in contrast to a mimesis of diva behavior. With origins in Latin American cabaret theaters dating as early as 1960, show travesti augments an ethnomusicological understanding of gendered labor in musical performance through showseras’ reproductive labor in aiding younger performers. Through my fieldwork I conducted interviews, attended performances, and even learned “como dar un show” (“how to give a show”) to practice “knowledge [that] is located, not transcendent…that [] must be engaged, not abstracted…and that it is forged from solidarity with, not separation from, the people” (Conquergood 2002, 149). I argue that showseras teach their daughters how to work “as women” less as an expression of their trans identity and more to gain access to nightlife economies that have otherwise shut the doors to migrants on both sides of the border. In San Diego/Tijuana, these pedagogies are entangled with and center around the memory of Liberia Aceves Castaneda, a trans migrant performer from the Mexican state of Nayarit, who founded the local scene in the 1990s. Thus, this paper posits a transfemme of color ethnographic intervention by centering the legacies of show travesti, or when women work as women.

From its beginnings at the fringes of American sci-fi conventions in the 1980s, to its cultivation on the early internet message boards, forums, and digital art galleries of the 1990s and 2000s, to its contemporary, transnational explosion onto mainstream cultural outlets, the “furry fandom” is now so expanded, diverse, and diffuse that it has become nearly impossible (nor desirable) to offer clean definitions of what it is or what it encompasses, apart from a generalized affinity for anthropomorphic animality. While the forms of cultural production under the umbrella of furry and its related subcultural ecologies are multiple, the practice and deployment of animalized vocalizations (barks, growls, hisses, howls, etc.) holds particular importance for community participants in performances of nonhuman self-fashioning and across networks of intracommunal intimacy. This is especially the case for many queer and trans members of these communities, who often must already contend both with the gendered politics of voice and the (equally gendered) technics of voice training. Drawing from multi-sited fieldwork at community gatherings and conventions across the US, I situate the messy vocalities (LaBelle) and “tranimalic explorations” (Hayward and Weinstein 2015) characteristic of trans-furry spaces (the convention center, the private meetup, the room party) within the broader fabric of queer/trans community practices that look to destabilize “the human” (what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man”) as a legible category of identity, which participate in the celebration of “nonstandard” queer intimacies (Berlant and Warner 1998), sex/gender/species transgression, and resistance against dominant regimes of capital, commodification, and anthropocentrism.

Transaurality has been theorized as a method of listening that attends to how sound makes transitions of gender and sex audible and actual (Blackburn 2026). This paper extends this method from the realm of recorded song to the social processes of musical production, circulation, and consumption in East London’s transfeminine nightlife scenes. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork with transfemme DJs, organizers, and dancers, I ask: How does transaurality operate on and off the dancefloor in ways that negate the spectacularizing forces of British and global (anti-)trans politics? Against the normative regimes of aurality (Ochoa Gautier 2014) and audibility (Minks 2023), transaural life seeks normalcy while maintaining a critical consciousness towards the dangerous aspirations of “the normal.” I explore three key sites: (1) The DJ booth, where trans women organize tempo, texture, and vocals to gather and distribute attention; (2) The dancefloor, where “the wall of dolls” navigates genre and affect within the limits of exhaustion and breathlessness; (3) The after party, where musical residues reside and where discourses of sound, urban space, and transness are exchanged. In each site, I locate the social and historical forces that shape which bodies can risk audibility (Born 2011; Gill-Peterson 2024). I conclude by reflecting on what ethnomusicological knowledge production asks of its subjects in the romances of resistance and community. Nightlife in its fullness, beyond just the dancefloor, urges us to consider what resides in “life” after the music stops, the lights come on, and the ordinary resumes.